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Blog - Fun

Archive for the ‘Fun’ Category

Nicholas Kruse participating in Gobi March 2010

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Gobi March route

Not content to sit around in a pub watching the World Cup like some of us, ReignDesign's own Nicholas Kruse is currently participating in the Gobi March, part of the 4 Deserts series of footraces that take place in the "hottest, coldest, windiest, and driest places on earth."

The Gobi March spans 250km over seven days, and takes place across China's Gobi Desert.

Some quick facts:

  • Temperatures for the Gobi March (China) can vary greatly – in 2010 average temperatures will be about 10°C / 50°F on the early part of the course and 35-40°C / 95-104°F on the later stages.
  • Competitors come from more than 20 countries with roughly 1/3 from North America, 1/3 from Asia and 1/3 from Europe.
  • The fastest completion time is around 25 hours and the slowest around 80 hours.
  • The average backpack weighs 20 lbs (8-9 kilograms).

You can check out daily updated coverage of the competitors' progress here.

Best of luck, Nick!

HTML5’s missing tag: sarcasm

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

I attended Barcamp Shanghai (Twitter: #barcampsh) at the weekend. It was an entertaining day with talks and demos on a variety of geeky topics. Here's a reproduction of my talk about HTML5's missing tag: <sarcasm>.


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ReignDesign visits Shanghai World Expo 2010!

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Shanghai Expo 2010 logo

Last Friday the ReignDesign team spent the day at the Shanghai Expo. The weather called for rain, but luckily it decided to co-operate with us and hold off. Also, being a relatively quiet day with only 432,000 people in attendance, we got to check out the massive Expo grounds and different pavilions about as crowd-free as one can expect.

Some highlights included:

- Lunch at Sri Lanka's pavilion
- Beer and fries at the Belgium pavilion
- Wine and cocktails at the Chile pavilion
- Mojitos at the Cuba pavilion (started seeing a pattern here...)
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Pig Rush on iPad

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

It was great to see Steve Jobs demoing Pig Rush on the new iPad at the launch event ;)

PigRush Video Review!

Monday, January 4th, 2010

We are proud to say that we got a awesome review on our iPhone game pigrush on Aol Video and YouTube by iPawdKid!

It's quite detailed and has instructions on how to play. If you haven't played PigRush here you can see how the game actually works and looks like.

Many thanks to the reviewer, and we promise to bring many exciting updates to PigRush in 2010! Did you know there is a secret way to play pigrush with a reigndeer christmas mode? You just shake your iphone when you are in the menu - screen until you hear the bells ring.... Try it out and see what happens!

From Arduino to apps: our most popular blog articles of 2009

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

lgo_TopTenAs the end of the year approaches, we though we'd highlight the most popular articles on our blog from 2009. It's clear you enjoyed our "how-to" style articles, so we'll definitely have more in 2010!

1. Using your own SQLite database in Android applications Fluxa explained how to get SQLite working on Android.

2. Liven up your boring UITableView: part 1 Matt gave a basic introduction to styling Table Views for the iPhone platform

3. From bytes to beats, Digital to Analog Conversion using AS3-Arduino Fluxa built a digital to analog converter with Arduino

4. App Store update: what does it mean for your app? Steve analyzed the latest changes on the iTunes App Store

5. Updating your iPhone app for Christmas Steve explained how we updated our apps for Christmas

6. Google AppEngine vs Amazon EC2 Todd compared two cloud computing platforms

7. Design an iPhone app in 15 minutes… then build and publish it in a day! Matt explained how we made 'Save Me!' in a day

8. Highlight your site’s hot content with the Google Analytics API Matt's tutorial on creating a "what's hot" section on your site

9. Make your blog weather-interactive in 6 easy steps Anna explains how to skin Wordpress depending on current weather conditions

10. Building faster websites by reducing HTTP requests: three techniques Matt on how to build a speedy website

Make your blog weather-interactive in 6 easy steps

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Follow these steps to have your wordpress-blog's design change according to the users local daytime and weather.

The first step explains how to modify the default wordpress theme. If you don't have a wordpress blog, or use a different theme, skip to step 2!

1. Access your wordpress-blog theme

First we will make a copy of the default theme to create your own theme, so that your changes wont be overwritten with the next wordpress- update:

On your server where your blog is located go into the folder "wp-content" and copy the "default" theme and rename it into something sensible, like "weathertheme". In your blog's admin-area on the left menu under "Appearance" activate your new theme. Change the read-write permissions for the "weathertheme"-folder on your FTP-server as explained on the wordpress-codex to 777. Now you are able to edit your theme's CSS and PHP files, best done from the editor in the admin-area under "Appearance">"Editor".
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ReignDesign attending Barcamp Shanghai!

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Barcamp Shanghai

We're happy to announce that the ReignDesign team is a proud sponsor of this year's Barcamp Shanghai!  We attended the previous Barcamp Shanghai in June, and held a very fun and insightful workshop on designing an iPhone app in fifteen minutes.

We'll be providing refreshments, and our team will be giving presentations on mobile technology, and some of the fun and interesting stuff we do here at ReignDesign.  We'll be tweeting live from the event, and will have a Twitter station available for all attendees to post their thoughts.

BarCamp Shanghai takes place on this Saturday, December 5th, from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For more information, be sure to check out the BarCamp Shanghai website.

Hope to see you there!

Talking rabbit reminders with Nabaztag and Google Calendar

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

At ReignDesign we use a shared Google Calendar to help plan our schedules. Todd previously wrote about Reigndesign's rabbit Nabby. What if there was a way to get Nabby to remind us about our upcoming appointments? Both Nabby and Google Calendar have simple APIs, and other folks have already written client libraries for PHP, so the amount of "glue" required to make it work was surprisingly small!

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We’re big in Japan

Friday, September 25th, 2009

pigrushjpWe recently noticed that sales of our newest game Pig Rush were doing well in Japan, so we commissioned a Japanese translation of the game description.
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